Dan Savage is a great sex columnist, but the guy is not going to win any awards as a political analyst.
Witness two recent posts. First, this one, saying that “Bush Had 55 Republican Senators and Got Everything He Wanted … And Barack Obama has 60 Senators and can’t seem to get shit out of the Senate.”
Strangely, he does not seem aware of what was pretty common knowledge to everyone just a short year ago: George Bush was an abject failure of a president. That’s true on a number of levels.
For one thing, he seems unaware of the fact that, well, Bush didn’t actually get very much through Congress. Tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, and Medicare. The Patriot Act. A few other bits and pieces. A couple free trade deals. His major second term agenda item, Social Security reform, crashed and burned. He went nowhere on immigration reform. He got his tax cuts but couldn’t make them permanent. He never got the money he wanted for lots of things (AIDS, NASA, etc.).
His victories were characterized by either A) total irresponsibility (all tax cuts all the time!) B) pissing off his base in order to get some Democrats (No Child Left Behind, for example) or C) Noun-verb-9/11. Category A is a big part of why his presidency was such an unsustainable policy disaster. It’s certainly not the sort of thing progressives ought to be aspiring to. Category B is what is making people so angry right now. And remember that the conservative base was REALLY frustrated with Bush about his domestic agenda. They thought he was a complete sell-out who just mouthed the right things but put no effort behind it. And of course, Category C is both historically unique and really just a variant on the first category.
So that’s one problem with this analysis. But another pretty significant one is that, well, George Bush was horrible. Remember how we used to be really angry about how he framed things in crazy polarizing terms (“with us or against us”) and acted like a jackass cowboy (“I’m the Decider”)? Remember that?
Not to oversimplify, but there is a bit of truth to the caricatures of conservatives and progressives. The former have a distinct authoritarian tinge while the latter can be seen as impossibly chaotic and disorganized. You can lament that, and hope for a progressive leader to go all Green Lantern on the issues. But when you adopt the tactics in order to fight the tactics, you rarely end up on the right side of things. The analogy isn’t perfect here, but to some extent progressives need to remember the arguments they make about torture. Namely, the fact that we don’t do that is precisely what distinguishes us.
The second bizarrely mis-directed Dan Savage post is here:
Here’s the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans: the leaders of GOP are terrified of their party’s base. And they should be: the GOP’s base is terrifying. The Democrat base—all those reasonable liberals and progressives and labor groups and queers—isn’t going to get anything it wants until we learn how to be just as scary.
Everything I just said applies here, too. But the thing I really wanted to emphasize is this:
The Democrats have MASSIVE majorities in the House, Senate, and won a presidential election about a year ago by seven million votes.
So, remind me again what about the conservative strategy we’re supposed to be admiring.
There’s this weird disconnect when progressive folks talk about how much the far right controls the Republican Party. One the one hand, they insist that this proves how wacky and irrelevant the Republicans have become, how far detached they are from the majority of the country, etc. It’s a sign of the fundamental irrelevance of them and their opinions. On the other hand, they seem incredibly jealous: if only we could exercise so much influence. What’s often left out, of course, is that the one might in some way be linked to the other.
Of course it’s frustrating. Of course we can demand that the Democratic Party in DC do a better job. Of course the left ought to continue pushing its goals. But let’s not lose our perspective here.